Set top boxes and other television receivers now incorporate powerful computing resources capable of providing features well beyond passive television viewing. Modern television receivers often provide time shifting capabilities (e.g., digital video recorders), place shifting capabilities and/or additional tuners for receiving multiple simultaneous programs, to name just a few examples. These new capabilities allow viewers to watch more programming at times and places that were not previously thought to be possible.
Often, however, viewers do not have the time or the desire to watch the entirety of a program, movie or other video presentation. In such cases, it would be helpful to have a summary or “highlight reel” so that the viewer could enjoy the most relevant portions of the presentation without watching the entire program. A broadcast of a sporting event, for example, could be summarized by the “big plays”, such as scoring events or the like.
At present, however, such summaries are most commonly available from news broadcasts or other media sources in which a producer, reporter or newscaster manually compiles video highlights for broadcast as part of a news report or the like. While news-type summaries can be helpful, they are usually only available for events that are of general interest to the newscaster's target market. Summaries are not available for the vast majority of programming that is otherwise available to the viewer. Moreover, news summaries are usually only available after some time has elapsed, making the summary less useful to the viewer. It would be helpful to have summaries for a wider array of programs that are available to the viewer on a more immediate basis.
Additionally, news-type summaries are generally very labor intensive to create. One or more human viewers (e.g., a producer, reporter or editor) typically watch the event itself to subjectively select the portions that are truly “highlights”. The selected highlights are typically manually compiled for a news broadcast or the like, which is often limited in time and/or may have other constraints on the types and amounts of “highlight” content that can be presented. Even when news-type program summaries are available, then, these tend to be constrained in time and content. Moreover, these summaries are typically limited to just the highlight content; there is no convenient way for the viewer to access content before or after the highlighted event occurs. It would be far more useful if summaries could be automatically created for certain programs that are of particular interest to individual viewers.
It is therefore desirable to create systems, devices and methods for automatically identifying the portions of particular television programs, movies or other video presentations that are of greatest interest to the user. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.